Courtesy photoA pregnant Sara Cole stands in an antique shop. Her husband, Chad Cole, had the photo on his cell phone. Sara Cole died in a crash almost one year ago. The couple's baby, delivered after the collision, died three days later.

She was this rare person who spoke ill of no one. She was an artist, their crafting partner, their older sister, and they had lost her.

If only this part of her would live, they hoped and prayed.

“And she was so beautiful and perfect. She laid there on the ventilators. Her little chest would rise and fall. She was perfectly and fully formed. It was hard to imagine she just wouldn’t open her eyes,” Felicia Fisher said Friday, sitting with her sister, Suzanne, in a car in the Brighton area.

In a day, their niece, Miranda Evangelene Cole, would have celebrated her first birthday.

“It’s been so hard to find meaning in life when something like this can happen, something that cuts so deep and alters who you were,” Felicia Fisher said.

For months, the grief was so much, she said she was on “autopilot.” The year felt like one long day, she said. Even if the sun was shinning, it was grey.

Now, some life, some color, is returning.

At 34, she is taking ballet, a way to out her emotions.

“We are working on hope,” she said. “It takes work. Hope is somewhere down the line.”

Friday, she and her sister went shopping. Suzanne Fisher, 30, a dentist in Boston, had returned to Michigan to be with Felicia, their parents, and their brother, Daniel, 27, all of whom live in the Brighton area.

They bought presents for Miranda and seemed to revel in it. Felicia Fisher, sickened last summer when she had to buy a baby shower gift for a friend, got a tutu, a walking horse and a stuffed bunny.

“We realized today, with all the items we bought her, how we would have spoiled her,” Felicia Fisher said.

They will take pictures and donate the goods to a needy family, she said.

The horse and bunny made them think of Cole, who had a love for unloved critters, and rescued cats and bunnies.

A florist in Jackson, Cole would put her bunny in a basket, bicycle to work and allow the rabbit to bounce around the shop, Felicia and their father Herb Fisher said.

In earlier years, the sisters would take in cats and hide them. They called them “closet cats,” but their mother, Carlene, always would find them, Felicia Fisher said.

After a while Friday, Felicia Fisher began to cry. She’s become accustom to public tears.

She has gotten “extremely empathetic,” even crying at TV news, she said.

It is difficult when people mention Cole, but her family doesn’t like to imagine everyone has forgotten. They seem to like to talk about the sister or daughter they miss.

Anything artistic, Cole could do it. She painted, sculpted and was a master seamstress. Once, she used old curtains to make a princess dress for her husband’s niece, Felicia Fisher said.

“She never spoke any bad words about anybody,” she said. Cole was a listener who did not judge.

“If somebody upset her, you could hear the disappointment in her voice, but she never said anything bad about them.”